How do people in your community get news and information about what’s happening where they live? You might answer newspapers, TV, radio … but how about social media? Libraries? The community center bulletin board? The church bulletin? The neighborhood listserv? The neighborhood bar?
Our news and information ecosystems are complex and evolving as media and technology change, while at the same time local newspapers consolidate and disappear. They are important to learn about if you want to make a positive impact on your community. Whether your goal is raising awareness about clean water, improving community safety, increasing civic participation or any number of other goals, you won’t get far if your community lacks quality information and equitable ways to communicate and engage.
This week, we’re excited to share that we’re launching a new tool that can help you map your media ecosystem to help find and support this information and engagement.
Across the country, foundations and philanthropists are coming to realize that local news and civic information is a critical element of a healthy community and democracy, and that they have a role to play in its future. Local news organizations have faced a catastrophic economic downturn, as well as increasing questions about how well they do or do not serve the diverse communities that make up our country. This erosion in local news is tied to drops in civic engagement, weakened connections in communities, and escalating costs of government due to lack of accountability.
We’ve heard many funders, philanthropists, and community foundations who are familiar with the problems say that it can be challenging to figure out the solutions — how can they get started supporting the future of news and information in their communities?
We’ve learned a lot through the assessments and funding choices we’ve undertaken in North Carolina, New Jersey, New Mexico, Colorado, Chicago, and beyond. Landscape analyses we commissioned in 2016 helped us decide where best to put our dollars, and have resulted in the establishment of the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund, the New Mexico Local News Fund, and the New Jersey Local News Lab Fund, as well as the support of the Colorado Media Project, the Field Foundation’s Media & Storytelling Program, Center for Cooperative Media, and more. Each of the places and organizations are working in unique and powerful ways to rebuild local news in their region.
Credit: Gil Askawa
The toolkit brings together some of this work we’ve done, along with the work of others we’ve learned from who are funding innovative and collaborative news efforts. We share case studies from funders we’ve learned from in Colorado, New Jersey, Detroit, and the Mountain West, and will share more in the months to come. This step-by-step guide will help you gather the information you need to take informed, effective action to improve your local news and information ecosystem, just like these funders have.
Undertaking this type of assessment is important because at Democracy Fund we know there isn’t one solution to figuring out the future of local news, but many solutions together. Funding with an ecosystem lens acknowledges that local news and information is interconnected and ever-changing. We don’t learn about our communities from any one source but from multiple sources and networks of trust. We learn valuable information from neighbors and listservs and community meetings as well as newspaper stories and radio programs. The makeup of those sources and networks depends on where we live.
Credit: Detroit Public Television
When we keep people at the center of our thinking — not news organizations per se, not the journalism industry — we begin to see ways we can strengthen what already exists and determine which gaps need to be filled. Rather than grounding solutions in any one organization, Democracy Fund chooses to evaluate the big picture and find whether there’s possible infrastructure and supports to fund that can take on the task of supporting an entire news and information ecosystem.
Get Started Using the Guide
This guide can help you take a look at that big picture and chart a path forward. It starts with understanding what makes up a healthy news ecosystem, then walks through the ways you can get to know your community, including research and engagement methods you can tailor to your goals. Our “deep dive” section includes a trove of free and low-cost data sources as well as some simple scavenger hunt-style assignments to help you see what those sources have to offer. We talk through ways your organization can act on what you learn so that your assessment will inform collaboration and ongoing engagement. And since we know budgets and bandwidth vary, we offer ideas for ways to right-size your assessment to the resources you have.
Copyright: CivicStory. October 2018 meeting of CivicStory’s Board of Directors (and special guest, 12-week-old Ila) in Summit, NJ
We’ve also included four case studies to flesh out our how-to guidance with concrete examples. These case studies show that each community is different, so what works in one place may not always work in another. This guide will help you find what the people in your own community need and how to make the greatest impact with the resources you have.
“Putting the people first was the most important element to our work. We didn’t do this because we thought we could save newspapers or newsrooms. We found it important that people in small towns have access to information to help them become more engaged citizens, so they’re able to make more informed decisions and they’re connected with the national conversation, the regional conversation, and the local conversation.” – LaMonte Guillory of the LOR Foundation, on their work in the Rural Mountain West.
While this guide is primarily designed for philanthropic organizations, anyone interested in improving local news and information is invited to adapt it to suit their own research.
The story we often hear about local news is dire, but it doesn’t have to be. We can face the realities of what we’re losing and the impact on our democracy while also seeing the assets and opportunities that exist. By being thoughtful, informed, inclusive and by sharing what we learn, we can make local news more resilient and sustainable.
Subscribe to the Local Fix for even more useful resources and information about local news at tinyletter.com/LocalFix
Hear more from Molly de Aguiar of the Independence Public Media Foundation and LaMonte Guillory of the LOR Foundation about their experience mapping their foundations’ local news ecosystems in a webinar on November 22 at 1 pm ET.
It’s early Friday morning, and Siyad Salah drives his taxi around Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis-St. Paul. He looks out the windshield, examining the neighborhood even though he’s been in the area many times. When he asks questions, he can be mistaken for an undercover cop rather than a taxi driver. He has a camera and tripod in the cab’s compartment. His pen and notebook are by his side.
Salah likes to talk to people he meets. From time to time, he stops by a gas station or a local grocery story, and then chats with some immigrant workers there. In a state where more than 8 percent of residents are foreign-born, Siyad knows that any interesting story about or for his community — whether it may come from a passenger or something that he’d find while driving — could unfold anytime.
I have known Salah for more than a decade. I first met him when I was with New America Media, and we organized a press event on immigration in the Twin Cities. Siyad works as a taxi driver by dawn and a journalist by noon. A refugee from Somalia, he once told me that he does journalism for the Somali and other African communities in Minnesota, and he drives a cab to earn a living for his family.
“When my family first came to America, there was no television show in Somali. We didn’t understand what was happening around us. My mother felt so lonely and isolated,” he said. “That was how I got motivated to be involved in producing a show called ‘Somali TV’ in our native language.”
Today, as immigration and race continue to be a profoundly complicated issue in Minnesota and U.S. politics in general, more Somali and other African media outlets have remained robust across the state — both to inform both newcomers and those immigrants and refugees who have already settled into a larger American society and to reduce stigma by magnifying the community’s positive contributions.
The Minneapolis-St. Paul region has the largest Somali population in the United States. Many of them first came as students or businesspeople, and in recent decades as refugees as a result of the Somali Civil War. To date, the Twin Cities have had a number of Somali programs and news outlets — including Somali TV, the state’s first Somali television program to air on Minneapolis Television Network (MTN) and other online platforms, Somali American, Somali Link Radio on KFAI, KALY Somali American Radio and Tusmo Times. The area also has a diverse African media, such as The Africa Paper, Mshale (Kenyan) and Zehabesha (Ethiopian).
“The [African] news outlets greatly help our communities integrate into the American life,” said Abdulkadir Osman, a Somali American community leader. “At the same time, they connect us all to our relatives and loved ones we left behind in our home countries.”
Osman, who founded Somali TV and brought it to MTN with Salah in 1997, says these African news media have played an important role in keeping his community civically engaged. They’ve helped to produce American politicians, writers, and activists, including Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Nuruddin Farah, and Abdi Warsame.
Abdulkadir Osman, founder of Somali TV. (Photo credit: Oni Advincula)
Minnesota’s other immigrant enclaves
In the late 19th century, European immigrants — mostly those from Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, and Italy — came to Minnesota and made it their home. Then, in the early 20th century, the next wave of immigrants were Poles and Mexicans. From the late 20th century till present, immigrants from Southeast Asia, East Africa, and Central America have settled across the state. The immigrant community has ultimately made Minnesota one of the most diverse states in the U.S., in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, age and educational attainment.
With the recent increase of the Asian immigrant population, Minneapolis-St. Paul has established strong and reliable Asian media. There’s one Chinese-language news outlet, China Tribune, in the Twin Cities. Still, the Hmong-American community is the most dominant market. Two of these prominent community outlets — Hmong Today and Hmong Times — are weekly publications. However, it’s Hmong radio stations have the largest audience-base in the Hmong community.
Wameng Moua, editor and publisher of Hmong Today, told me that most of the U.S.-born or raised Hmong Americans tend to read the online English edition or on social media, while the first-generation and Hmong immigrants prefer to get their information from radio stations.
“Most younger Hmong Americans interact and get their information on Facebook. So, it is a must to have a social media account for the paper — and it is less expensive to run,” he said.
Martha Vickery, publisher of the English-language The Korean Quarterly, said that the Asian population has greatly increased in the Twin Cities. “We are seeing more and more Southeast Asian immigrants — Thai, Cambodians, Filipinos and Vietnamese — immigrating to the area,” she said. “They could surpass the Hmong population in the coming years.”
Most recently, the Sahan Journal launched in August 2019 with coverage for and about Minnesota’s immigrant communities, led by Somali-American journalist Mukhtar Ibrahim. “We want to show how these communities are transforming, what they’re going through, and be a professional news website that produces high-quality, highly edited stories,” said Ibrahim.
That means community-based and led media will be all the more important in the Twin Cities and across the state, as this niche market continues to inform and engage different immigrant populations, connecting them to their home countries while creating new ties in their current one.
Oni Advincula was a former editor and national media director for New America Media and a correspondent for The Jersey Journal. Currently, he works as a media consultant and and a freelance journalist. He is the co-author of “The State of Ethnic and Community Media in New Jersey” and has worked with ethnic media in 45 states for more than 20 years.
Last June, Mayor Edward Terry walked into the Clarkston Community Center’s meeting hall for a panel discussion on the upcoming census. The hall was packed with community leaders, legislators, refugees, and immigrants. For a small city located east of Atlanta, Clarkston has become the most ethnically diverse square mile in the United States.
“I am truly honored to welcome you to our city, known as the Ellis Island of the South,” Terry said. “The ethnic media in this room plays a very important role to inform our residents who come from every corner of the world.”
Since the mid-70s, Clarkston has welcomed Somalis fleeing civil war, Bhutanese fleeing ethnic cleansing, as well as Cambodians, Nepalis, Croatians, Eritreans, and Liberians escaping violence and religious persecution in their home countries. Now, as Clarkston continues to attract refugees and immigrants from Asian, Central American, and African nations, the city — and metro Atlanta as a whole — has become one of the major hubs of ethnic media in the country.
“Every day, we have programs that are aired in at least 10 languages. And the hosts, mostly volunteers, also have first-hand knowledge of the cultural nuances of their own communities,” said Hussein Mohammad, a founding member and former director of Sagal Radio, a small Clarkston-based radio station that broadcasts in Swahili, Sino-Tibetan, Tigrinya, and Arabic, to name a few.
Recently arrived immigrants from South Korea have also made metro Atlanta their home.
“You go to Duluth [which is part of Gwinnett County, about 27 miles from Atlanta city center], you would think you are not in the Deep South. With rows and rows of Korean establishments, and hundreds of thousands of Koreans who live there, it feels more like Seoul,” said Jong Won Lee, former editor of Korea Daily. “If you speak English, you’d be the minority.”
Notably, metro Atlanta has a huge Korean ethnic media market, perhaps on par with those in Los Angeles and New York. In Gwinnett County alone, the Korean population increased by 155 percent from 2000 to 2017. These numbers don’t take account undocumented Korean immigrants, who tend to be undercounted. When I spoke with Eugene Rhee, Program Director of the Center for Pan Asian Community Services, several years ago, he underscored that the community has a different count of Korean population. By their estimates, there has been a 1,000 percent increase in the Korean population in Duluth — or Gwinnett County — over the last 15 years.
The Atlanta area now has four major Korean news outlets — three dailies (Korea Daily, Korea Times, and Chosen Daily) and a television station WKTB-CD, which is owned by Korean American TV Broadcasting.
The Chinese immigrant population has also been growing quickly, and so are Chinese-language publications. Less than a decade ago, The World Journal was the only Chinese-language publication in the area. Now, there are three other Chinese newspapers within the city limits, namely Atlanta Chinese News, China Tribune, Duowei Times, and The Epoch Times — the Chinese-American media network that covers 21 languages and 33 countries.
“More and more Chinese people are moving into Atlanta and buying properties. They think that Atlanta has more affordable real estate properties, better weather and friendlier people,” said Lily Lee, former publisher and editor of The World Journal Atlanta. “Soon, we will have our own Chinatown here.”
Luis Estrada (right), reporter for Telemundo Atlanta, and HB Cho, former reporter for The Korea Daily.
And according to the Pew Research Center, Atlanta ranks 19th among the sixty largest metro areas in the country for total Hispanic population. Nearly 600,000 Hispanics reside in the area; they represent about 11 percent of metro residents, and over half of the almost million Hispanics in Georgia overall.
Mundo Hispanico, the largest Spanish-language weekly in Georgia — and across the Southern states — has expanded its distribution and operation to North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and Florida. Formerly owned by Cox Communications, Mundo Hispanico has been shifting to digital, according to its editors.
Given the long history of African Americans in the South, the oldest media outlets in Atlanta are black newspapers. The Atlanta Daily World was founded in 1928 and The Atlanta Voice in 1956. Both played a significant role during the start of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South and continue to serve thousands of readers in the city today.
Despite some punitive, anti-immigration laws in Georgia, Teddy Dagwe, publisher ofDinq Magazine, a monthly that serves both the Christian and Muslim Ethiopian communities in metro Atlanta, says that immigrant communities continue to thrive in the area.
“We have each other here in big numbers. And it makes a difference when you have someone like Mayor Terry who understands us, who lives with us, and who listens to us,” Dagwe said.
Clarkston Mayor Edward Terry with Atlanta ethnic media and CPACS staff members.
Many see Clarkston and the greater Atlanta area as a bright spot in the national landscape — a place that has continued to welcome immigrants and refugees, where ethnic media and civic leaders are actively engaging with these communities to respond to their news and information needs.
Oni Advincula was a former editor and national media director for New America Media and a correspondent for The Jersey Journal. Currently, he works as a media consultant and and a freelance journalist. He is the co-author of “The State of Ethnic and Community Media in New Jersey” and has worked with ethnic media in 45 states for more than 20 years.
In 1994, as the number of migrants coming to the United States started to hit a peak, Abu Taher arrived in New York City. A daily newspaper in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, that he worked for at the time had sent him to the U.S. on assignment. Taher lived in a small apartment that he shared with more than 10 other Bangladeshi immigrants in the Bronx.
It was his first experience to get his bearings in a newfound American life.
Whenever he would go to social gatherings on weekends or visit the mosque, Taher realized, the Bangladeshi immigrant families that he’d meet had almost exactly the same questions in his mind: where to find a reasonable car dealer, a trusted immigration lawyer and an experienced real estate broker, or how to access information. Those questions, though they seemed basic, kept him wide awake at night; he knew that they were critical for anyone new to this country.
A veteran journalist, Taher decided to establish his own weekly newspaper in 1996, Bangla Patrika, that would serve as a “life link” to members of his community in the New York and New Jersey areas and their loved ones in Bangladesh, covering news and information that they could use practically.
“That was the main purpose of the publication: giving information to my fellow Bangladeshi immigrants on how to live a normal life in a new homeland and, at the same time, connecting them to the homes they left behind,” he said.
Print as the flagship
Taher said that Bangla Patrika, now one of the longest-running ethnic media news outlets in the city, has remained true to its core purpose.
Despite significant changes brought by digital technology — utilizing mobile devices, blogging — joining multiple social media networks and producing slideshows and videos, Taher said that the survival of his paper still largely rests in the same community that he’s served since its inception over 20 years ago.
Like hundreds of ethnic media in New York and New Jersey, particularly among newspapers, the print edition remains to be the flagship of the news outlet — unlike its mainstream counterparts that have shifted by and large to digital and relegated its print edition to a secondary portal to news access.
In fact, over the last decade, some digital-first ethnic media publishers inNew York and New Jersey have found that some community members they serve don’t consider a news organization legitimate unless it has a print edition.
“In the Filipino community, you are not considered a ‘real’ newspaper, if you don’t have a print edition,” said Cristina Pastor, publisher and editor of FilAm.net.
Business sustainability
While many publishers can see the value of digital presence, not all in the ethnic media sector believe it’s the most effective way to keep the business afloat.
Kaushik Shah, publisher of Gujarat Darpan, a monthly magazine in Gujarati based in central New Jersey, said that his paper’s circulation grew to nearly 15,000 copies a month — a 75 percent increase over the last 20 years.
While his magazine has an online edition, mostly PDF files uploaded to its website, he said he owes the growth to his print subscribers and readers who are mostly Gujarati immigrants in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. These subscribers, according to Shah, may be on Facebook using their smartphones, but the majority of them still access their news and information through print.
“This is why enhancing my digital existence is not a top priority for us. Gujarati readers who are, for example, in San Francisco, they could get their news from other Gujarati publications based in California — we don’t have to capture them on the Internet,” Shah added. “But in order for us to stay in this business, it is not just all about increasing the number of readers from across the U.S. and around the world, but rather it is about going back to the basics: provide local content that our readers actually need.”
Advertisers Still Prefer Print
Kleibeel Marcano, publisher and editor of Reporte Hispano, one of the biggest Spanish-language weeklies in New Jersey, was on the same page. The ad sales, he admitted, have gone down, but the number of his readers — including those on social media and online generally — has increased nearly tenfold in recent years.
Kleibeel Marcano (third from left) with other NJ ethnic media reporters at a press briefing, organized by Montclair State University’s Center for Cooperative Media. (Photo Credit: Anthony Advincula)
As he enhanced the paper’s digital presence, it also increased his overhead cost. Most interestingly, Marcano admitted that his paper, like any ethnic media news outlets on a shoestring budget, also finds it challenging to monetize digital content:
“Our biggest advertising revenue sources still come from our print advertisers,” Marcano said.
While he lost some of the paper’s big corporation advertisers, he added, most businesses in the community still place ads in the print edition.
“Whether we are expanding our reach through online or boosting our social media presence, there’s no way that we could get rid of our print edition,” Marcano said. “The Internet has inundated our readers with information that they actually don’t care about, with unreliable and untrusted sources. Because our readers know that we are part of our community and we know our community, they will continue to grab our newspaper from the newsstand.”
Oni Advincula was a former editor and national media director for New America Media and a correspondent for The Jersey Journal and The Associated Press. He is the co-author of “The State of Ethnic and Community Media in New Jersey” and has worked with ethnic media in 45 states for more than 20 years.
Last year, Democracy Fund commissioned a study focused on philanthropic support of newsroom diversity. The findings revealed troubling disparities: Between 2009 and 2015, only 6% of the $1.2 billion in grants invested in journalism, news, and information in the United States went towards efforts serving specific racial and ethnic groups, and only 7% went towards efforts serving economically disadvantaged populations.
To begin addressing the longstanding gap in capital and resources for news entrepreneurs of color, we are helping launch the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. It’s designed to support and build the capacity of newsrooms by and for people of color, who are best positioned to deliver critical news and information to their communities.
So far, the Fund has raised $3.6 million and will begin making grants in the first quarter of 2020. Donors include Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, Ford Foundation, Google News Initiative, and the News Integrity Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Maya Thornell-Sandifor, the director of Racial Equity Initiatives at Borealis Philanthropy, where the fund is hosted, explains why this initiative is meaningful:
“Media outlets led by and for people of color break stories and offer perspectives that are relevant to the communities they serve and inform the public dialogue in invaluable ways. Now more than ever, we need reporting that addresses the root causes of racial injustice and confronts racism with unflinching honesty and courage. This fund will strengthen the capacity of news organizations that prioritize building long-term relationships with communities of color, helping them expand their reach and impact.”
Journalism has long struggled to reflect the diversity of the communities it serves. However, throughout American history, media by and for people of color has played a critical role in informing, engaging and connecting communities who were left out or forced out of our national story. Over the last year, we have published three reports shining a spotlight on this history, and chronicling the role of American Indian, African American, and Hispanic media. While the entire media industry is struggling today, the economic challenges facing these publications are made all the more difficult by longstanding inequalities in access to funding.
“Media organizations led by people of color have long been a vanguard of our democracy, holding the powerful accountable for the ways it treats its most vulnerable citizens in ways mainstream media has often failed to do. It was organizations such as the black press that campaigned most vigorously to abolish slavery, to pass federal legislation against lynching, and to end Jim Crow, when mainstream media either ignored these stories altogether or sided with the powerful. Journalists of color consistently bring credibility and accuracy to the coverage of our multiracial democracy, yet media organizations led by and serving people of color consistently struggle to gain the types of resources that allow them to have a broad and sustained impact. We at the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting are excited to see how the fund will help to change that by providing pivotal support to these newsrooms at a time when their unique perspective and coverage is desperately needed.”
The Racial Equity in Journalism Fund launches today, but that is just the beginning. We know it will need to grow and expand to meet the needs and catalyze the opportunities we see in the field. We know a more representative industry is crucial to ensuring all communities have access to news with a broader, more accurate array of perspectives, and we hope the fund will serve as a meaningful step forward in closing the historic gap in funding for entrepreneurial journalists of color.
If you’re an outlet interested in receiving support from the fund, you can sign up here to receive forthcoming updates about the application process. And if you’re a funder interested in supporting this work, please contact Borealis Philanthropy’s Director of Racial Equity Initiatives, Maya Thornell-Sandifor: mtsandifor [at] borealisphilanthropy.org.
A: “It is the movement of thoughts and ideas through time and space”
– Matt Locke, Director of Storythings to Tony Ageh, New York Public Library, Chief Digital Officer
As part of research conducted for the Engaged Journalism Lab exploring how philanthropy can support diverse, inclusive newsrooms, I visited local newsrooms, interviewed experts, technical practitioners and community groups, sat with journalists and listened.
A substantial part of this work has involved scanning similar fields and communities also undergoing deep transitions and shifts to surface what lessons, patterns and practices in those spaces can be applied in the newsroom context.
They share similar struggles and are asking themselves a similar set of questions media and journalism funders are grappling with: What comes next? How can we have the most impact? How can we support leaders in this space? What does growth look like in this new world? Where do we go from here?
The challenges are shared and I observed more leaders from overlapping fields asking these set of questions in common physical space with community journalists.
That is because for many communities, physical newsrooms and newspaper buildings are relics of the past.
The physical headquarters of newspaper buildings and local broadcast stations once represented prestige and as sources of pride for its owners. The buildings were often grandiose, ornate, symbolic to news organizations stature in civic life. The structures reflected, both visually and physically, lop-sided power dynamics between newsrooms and the communities they covered. As David Uberti wrote in Columbia Journalism Review,
“The buildings often had on-site printing presses, adding the machinery’s low hum to already buzzing newsrooms, and affording residents the opportunity to see a newspaper being made. The properties were a physical link between journalists and the communities they covered, the ultimate branding tool. Their dazzling architecture and mammoth scale sometimes rivaled those of government buildings or other institutions, showcasing newspapers’ prominent place in the community.”
Journalism is intended to serve the public. Yet for more than a generation it was considered standard practice for local news operations to be housed within ornate, sweeping physical structures creating a structural hierarchy and barrier separating journalists from the very same public they were intended to serve. On the surface there was a functional reason for this: printing press operations required substantial space and the technology to decouple printing press operations from newsroom operations did not become was not ubiquitous or affordable for local newsrooms. But there was also a more sentimental, emotional rationale for this practice: the buildings that hosted news headquarters were universally considered by owners, investors and powerful actors as highly prized possessions and regarded as crown jewels to local media empires.
Until the crown jewels became unprofitable.
As the news industry struggled to find ways to increase revenue, many buildings that served as local news headquarters in cities around the country were put on the market. The buildings the news operations occupied were more profitable than the businesses run inside it.
The Oakland Tribune permanently moved out of the historic Tribune Tower building in 2007, the building has turned over ownership several times since the sale. News operations for The Oakland Tribune relocated multiple times over the ensuing decade before the 150-year-old publication ultimately ceased publication in 2016. Around the country, amid rising real estate values and diminishing revenues, legacy local news operations faced similar fates: in 2011, the Inquirer Building which over the years housed both the The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily Newssold to developers for an estimated $20 million dollars. In 2014, the building that once housed the Detroit Free Presssold to developers for more than $8 million dollars. Claiming losses of around $11 million dollars, Publisher E.W. Scripps Co. placed The Rocky Mountain News up for sale. The paper’s final issue was published in 2009, it’s former headquarters sold and later demolished in 2007. The Des Moines Register left the space the newspaper occupied for more than 95 years, the building was later sold and is now luxury lofts.
Market dynamics led local news outlets to shift from real estate owners to tenants or in less fortunate outcomes, to shift from real estate owners to fading memories. While the digital disruption led the remaining outlets left standing to reckon with a laundry list of constraints; smaller staffs, shrinking budgets and ever-shrinking audiences, just to name a few. For others, this flux presented an opportunity to redefine and renew: the fundamentals of the journalism business have altered, the nature of distribution and news consumption has changed, how newsrooms connect with audiences must be reimagined. This all presents an opportunity for reinvention, as former Detroit Free Press editor Paul Anger describes:
“It’s the publishing industry. And when you’re in a building that really doesn’t serve your needs anymore — there could be open space, configurations that don’t work for you, equipment or costs that don’t make sense — moving somewhere new is starting fresh.”
An opportunity also exists here for media funders as well: how can diversity, inclusion and connection to communities be baked into this stage of reinvention?
Remix Revitalization
While the business of media has altered, the fundamentals of journalism has not: journalism exists to serve the public. As these grandiose buildings were sold off over the aughts, strong journalism was still produced as technology transformed the spacial needs required to do run a newsroom and cover communities. Media funders can support newsrooms continued retreat from structural barriers between journalists and communities by remixing how philanthropy invests in communities that bridge overlapping ecosystems also in deep transitions.
Philanthropy has long served as a catalyst for community and industry revitalization efforts. This hybrid role as convener, organizer and catalyst is one that is not unfamiliar to many funders. As James M. Ferris writes in Stanford Social Innovation navigating complexity is, in fact, an inherent strength for many community funders:
“… philanthropy is able to lead, not by dollars alone, but by leveraging all of its assets — expertise, reputation, and networks — to address public problems. These foundations purposefully forged relationships and networks with stakeholders in the community. They also consciously developed intellectual capital about programs and places. That latter behavior brings to light another important reason why they have proven effective leaders. In addition to embracing adaptive and distributed leadership, these philanthropies have risked developing and advancing a point of view. Foundations that aspire to be changemakers must be much more than grantmakers. The conventional view that “it is not about us” must give way to the willingness to set a course and stand by it. Foundations can create and maintain a point of view to great effect, as long as they are credible and transparent.”
The key here is for media funders to see themselves as active participants in community ecosystems rather than passive grantmakers. It requires a conscious and continual shift of power dynamics that allows the imposing, structurally cold and physically removed newspaper labyrinths of the past to continue to dispose. In it’s place, media donors can catalyze and pilot fresh systems, practices and mechanisms that allow for deeper integration into communities journalists serve and for closer listening to audiences local media seeks to reach. Through accepting change as a constant, media funders can proactively lead deliberate, continual investments into more resilient newsrooms through funding models for local news to build capacity to adapt to continuously change and newsroom reinvention.
Avengers Assemble: Bring Newsgathering & Programming into Community Spaces
Ariell Johnson owns Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse in Philadelphia, the first comic bookstore on the east coast owned by a black woman. Johnson got the idea to create a hybrid community hub when a beloved coffeeshop across the street from a local comic book shop she frequented closed down — she wanted Amalgam to bridge both functional spaces, recreate the inclusive, warm environment she experienced and serve as a gathering space she knew the community needed.
Today, Amalgam describes itself as a “… celebration of geek culture. A place for comic book fans, hardcore gamers, movie addicts, television connoisseurs, and zombie apocalypse survivalists to meet, and with their powers combined, change the world a little bit.”
Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse. Photo by Sabrina Hersi Issa
In my opinion, Johnson succeeded in her intention to create a warm, inclusive environment. On my visit to Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse for this research, it struck me as an ideal community hub: curious, friendly strangers, plenty of nooks to get lost in conversation or explore new worlds, ample convening and learning space and yes, comic books and coffee. For journalists invested in understanding the pulse of a neighborhood and it’s many varied voices, Amalgam stands out.
In an interview with me, Johnson describes the space as something built with flexibility and change in it’s DNA because community was centered in the intentionality behind Amalgam’s design:
“Community has been the center of this, while designing the shop and everything, it was always the goal to make it be conducive to be a community space. Just from how everything was designed and setup, even how the retail shelves in the back of the store are arranged, it was all done with the understanding that we’d like to be able to build community back here. Things need to be able to be moved, rearranged, to push things out of the way so that we can arrange the floor as we need.”
For media funders invested in reimagining newsgathering truly rooted within local communities, it is worth exploring how donors can create opportunities to support local, diverse entrepreneurs also embarking reimagining possibilities in their communities. In an interview with me, Johnson explains the most straightforward way for funders to accomplish this is to support diverse entrepreneurs in local communities:
“Make it a point to try to fund diverse entrepreneurs. I’ve gone into loan meetings when I was applying for loans and I have to meet with the loan committee and I am the only person in that room that looks like me. Not that I didn’t know that that was the case before, but it’s one thing to know it and it’s a very different thing to experience. It is very easy for me to understand why white boys get funded and other people don’t. Because if you walk into a room and you look like everyone in the room then I think there is this kinship that people can feel with you like, ‘I don’t know about what it is about this boy. He just reminds of myself.’ When I’m walking into a meeting I’m not reminding anybody of anybody. All of that works against people who do not fit a mold. So look for diverse products and make sure your decision-maker team is diverse. So you’re not just in a room full of white people when you’re trying to make those financial decisions.”
Amalgam owner Ariell Johnson depicted on Marvel cover. Image from Marvel.
For other media funders seeking to follow suit, Johnson advises: “I think it is not considered sexy to provide support for operations to help businesses stay open but I believe it’s more impactful to support organizations that are already doing the work and just need help to continue doing it.”
Develop a Presence in Collaborative Work Environments
Pipeline Philadelphia: Photo by Sabrina Hersi Issa
Tayyib Smith is a Philadelphia based entrepreneur behind several ventures including Little Giant Creative, 215 Magazine and the Institute for Hip Hop Entrepreneurship. He is one of the partners of Pipeline Philly, a collaborative co-working space that overlooks Philadelphia’s City Hall.
Pipeline Philadelphia: Photo by Sabrina Hersi Issa
The space is home to companies and organizations of a range of missions and sizes, including civic organizations and hyperlocal news startups. In an interview with me for this research, Smith observed that Pipeline’s success in supporting diverse and growing organizations is due, in part, because the team of people stewarding the space were made up of individuals who have built diverse businesses and companies. “The thing that separates Pipeline probably from most co-working spaces not just in Philly, but nationally, is that we have a really keen eye for aesthetics and for a concierge level of service. I think being an entrepreneur, you know what other small businesses and moderate sized businesses may want. It probably gave us a bit of an advantage in the marketplace.”
Pipeline Philadelphia: Photo by Sabrina Hersi Issa
The Knight Foundation became Pipeline Philadelphia’s first marquee tenant. On a tour of Pipeline for this research, I observed with Pipeline’s community manager Lindsay Tillery, how programming reinforces collaborative partnerships among companies and organizations hosted at the space. Proximity enriches context and in this context; journalists, makers, developers, strategists, marketers and educators all working in proximity to one another has added dimensions of depth and in most cases, high-levels of growth to their work. For many, the space is not intended as a fixed solution. In our tour Tillery noted many civic media and local news startups seeded at Pipeline eventually grew out of the space as their teams expanded.
Partner with Overlapping Ecosystems in Reinvention
The technology sector is no stranger to disruption and flux. Amazon Web Services rendered racked server space unnecessary and distributed agile teams have slowly become more commonplace than fixed, co-located engineering bases. It is an evolution that is not dissimilar to how grandiose newspaper buildings slowly hollowed out as printing presses gave away to digital distribution.
Like the media industry, the cost and infrastructure necessary to build and scale a modern technology company has changed the landscape of possibility and the profile of who can afford to become technology entrepreneurs. Like the media industry, the technology sector is at odds with it’s role and responsibility to confront the structural and systemic conditions that have fueled the industry’s homogeneity; specifically a severe lack of racial, ethnic, gender diversity.
Startups can launch from anywhere and a few Silicon Valley leaders have seized this opportunity to steer the tech sector toward reimagining itself, specifically in regards to improving diversity among its very homogenous talent pools and positioning emerging companies to thrive beyond Silicon Valley.
Leslie Miley is a veteran Silicon Valley engineer, an alum of the engineering teams at Twitter, Apple, Google and most recently, Director of Engineering at Slack. In addition to his roles in engineering leadership, Miley is a longtime outspoken champion for improving diversityand inclusion in the technology sector and has regularly challenged Silicon Valley companies to build products and company culture in accordance with integrity, principles and values.
At the beginning of the 2017, Miley announced he was taking a leave from his role at Slack to join Venture for America (VFA), a nonprofit that works with recent grads who want to work in startups and create jobs in American cities. Miley will be working to launch VFA’s Executive-in-Residence (EIR) program that will embed senior-level Silicon Valley talent with VFA companies in cities around the country with emerging, diverse startup ecosystems.
Image from Venture for America
The technology industry shares the media industry’s well-documented challenges with diversity, inclusion, fostering leadership opportunities for leaders from underrepresented and nontraditional backgrounds against ever-changing business constraints. The tech sector also holds tremendous, outsized influence to shape of local economies, dominant culture and civic life. For philanthropy, it is worth observing how senior leaders within the technology sector are building solutions designed to integrate diversity and inclusion as an imperative and prerequisite for continued industry growth.
Miley wrote on Medium in a post announcing his role, “I listened to the frustrations of countless founders of all races and genders on how hard it is to raise funds, to find and retain good talent, and grow their companies in their communities due to the scarcity of what we take for granted in Silicon Valley. It is painfully obvious that this very talent is being systematically drained from most of America’s hardest hit cities. A large percentage of this entrepreneurial talent ends up in New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Denying these communities the talent and resources they need to create and grow their start-up communities. By encouraging and enabling a population of non-diverse entrepreneurs to relocate to Silicon Valley, and disrupt and innovate in the technology space with little thought to the scope or impact of their platforms, we have successfully created the means to disrupt not only industries but also communities, and countries. And we do this with little, if any, empathy when it comes to the impact on the well being of people, particularly women and people of color.”
In an interview with me for this research, Miley describes how community shifts the nature of the innovation VFA startups and other tech companies based beyond Silicon Valley drives, “The problems that are going to be solved in Cleveland, Philly, Detroit are going to be different than the problems that we will solve here [in Silicon Valley]. Where the pain point in the community is going to be different so the problem space is going to be different. Innovation isn’t about getting two guys together and giving them a bunch of money and hoping they change the world. It is sometimes just solving a problem that impacts a large group of people and that problem space is different from community to community. Community is based upon a lot of different things.”
The community dynamic Miley speaks to points to an opportunity for media funders seeking to support stronger local journalism.
Community drives context. It changes the nature of place and for journalists, the stories we tell about innovation.
The resilience and future relevance of the technology sector relies upon the industry growing, evolving and meaningfully supporting diversity and inclusion. What are the narratives media funders can support from local community industries actively attempting to revitalize itself?
Miley explains in an interview with me,
“I intimately understand, based on where my parents lived and where a lot of my friends lived in other parts of the United States, what happens when you don’t have economic opportunities. What happens to communities that don’t have economic opportunities? One of the things that happens to communities that don’t have economic opportunities for a prolong periods of time is that they become extremely desperate. They are desperate for jobs. They are desperate for anything that’s going to change the decline of their communities, of their friends of the family and their loved ones…We have such an amazing economic engine in Silicon Valley. How can we export that to parts of the United States that aren’t partaking in the economic resurgence that we are experiencing so vividly here.”
Accelerating the nature of this change through seeding experienced senior-level Silicon Valley talent in an EIR program will ramp up the speed and maturation of startup ecosystems around the country. It will present different and diverse innovation narratives and it will develop, as Miley explains, companies trying to solve different problems, serve diverse communities and surface more expansive stories.
“You are seeding an ecosystem to grow. The story I’d like to see is the ability to be a part of an ecosystem that is not just changing the economic activities in an area but is actually changing people’s lives,” Miley explains.
Change is constant and for media funders, so are the opportunities to invest new stories, storytellers and communities living through flux. In order to meet this moment, the stories we tell about change within our industry and communities we cover must also shift.
These shifts present opportunities to reimagine media within communities as vehicle for co-investment in community.
Sabrina Hersi Issa is an award-winning human rights technologist and leads global research and analysis for philanthropy. She organizes Rights x Tech, a gathering for technologists and activists and runs Survivor Fund, a political fund dedicated to championing the rights of survivors of sexual violence.
“We need stories of hope and possibility, stories that reflect the reality of our lived experiences.”
— Janet Mock, Redefining Realness
There is a necessity to ground community journalism in community truths. Those truths are not always as cut and dry as facts, but rather are negotiated through deep listening and engagement with the people you are trying to serve. Community truths makes space for, and recognize the diversity of lived experiences that shape how we understand our place and how we respond to the issues that face us.
A critical responsibility of journalism is to bear witness. Yet newsrooms large and small struggle routinely with the simple practice of listening and holding up an accurate mirror to complicated, nuanced truths in their communities. The causes of this are varied; staffing, time constraints, cultural bias, risk aversion, language barriers, just to name a few. But the end results are the same: Important stories go untold, or are told through a narrow lens that doesn’t reflect the lived experiences of the community.
Kassi Underwood, author of the book May Cause Love, spoke to this issue on a recent podcast. “I can hear journalists over the phone stop typing when I say something new. When I say something that is already part of the public conversation on abortion, I can hear them typing. And the minute I say something different — it’s silence,” Underwood said. “I don’t know if that’s because they’re listening or because they think ‘Oh that’s not useable or something like that’. But that has been frustrating because that was part of my loneliness — not being able to say everything.”
Underwood was sharing her story on the podcast The Abortion Diary, a project created by Dr. Melissa Madera in the summer of 2013. The project operates under a simple premise: “What if millions of people broke their silence and told the truth about their lives and their choices?” Madera’s podcast has created a container for listening to individual truths about a subject matter where listening and open dialogue are often replaced by talking points and heated debate. As such it is an interesting example to explore how difficult issues can be better covered in journalism and discussed in community.
Image from The Abortion Diary.
Through her podcast, Madera has traveled around the country physically bearing witness and recording the personal stories of more than 240 people. The podcast stands out for the way it presents personal stories in their full complexity without judgement. “Every experience is different,” Madera told me. “We’re not one person or one group. We’re a community of people just like any community of people with different people inside of it. […] It’s not one kind of story. It’s all kinds of stories.” Each episode follows a similar format: the person with the lived experience narrates their story, speaking for however long they wish and at their own pace. There is no framing, no leading questions, no judgement, just listening. On each episode Madera is not credited as the show’s ‘Host’ but rather the ‘Listener.
This kind of verbatim story sharing is more closely aligned with documentary film than traditional journalism, but there are important lessons here that journalists and media funders should take seriously. Listening builds trust. When journalists and newsrooms deepen their capacity for listening they are investing in trust. As journalists work more intentionally and thoughtfully with communities to bear witness, the deepened trust in communities will lead to more trusted journalism. This is an arc that cannot be driven by generating clicks or shares, but rather, it is anchored in service to community. That trust can help reposition newsrooms as partners and leaders in communities. Investing in listening is investing in leadership — a form of leadership forged from journalists and communities working together.
Community is often described around a sense of place, not a shared experience. However, Madera’s Abortion Diary is an example of how community can form around shared experience and through bearing witness. Madera describes seeking community as a catalyst for the project:
“This project really came from a need to listen. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to listen to other people’s stories. I wanted a physical community. I was actually looking for a physical space where I can be in community with other people who’ve had abortions and I couldn’t find that. So then I looked for an online space where I could listen. […] I wanted to hear people’s voices, and that’s where the podcast came to be. And I didn’t know anything about podcasting, so I had to learn that part, but I knew I wanted to be in a situation where — or in a place where I would be listening to people share their stories.”
As part of my research for the Engaged Journalism Lab exploring how philanthropy can support diverse, inclusive newsrooms, I visited local newsrooms, interviewed experts and community groups, sat with journalists and listened. This included sitting with professional listeners like Madera to understand how philanthropy can better support deep listening and diverse stories across different issues and mediums. There is an opportunity for media funders to support mechanisms and models for deep listening.
Podcasts are obviously associated with listening, but in fact, there is a growing collection of community listening projects across the country such as The Listening Post in New Orleans and tools like GroundSource. In many cases, the journalists are the ones in search of community, not vice versa. Madera highlights the power of also building community among those seeking community. When she failed to find media that featured complicated, nuanced truths about abortion experiences, Madera slowly and story by story, created one of the most robust, deep and diverse media platforms on one of the most contentious issues of our time. The project is entirely funded by listeners.
For media funders, it is worth examining how forums for listening can fill a void in communities and how journalists in diverse communities can become better listening stewards. Madera says funders seeking to support this work should understand that they are investing in facilitating a process, not a product. Process is not quick, building trust requires time.
“I can see the difference in people through telling their stories, but it’s not a quick fix. It’s like people share their stories and then they start feeling comfortable sharing their stories with other people,” Medera told me. “I keep on telling people that my project is not about changing people’s minds. That is never why I started this project… it’s about people being able to tell a story they normally would not have shared, and about feeling like it’s part of their life that they can talk about in the world. That only happens in their own community, so this is a community project.”
Building community through listening is leadership. Finding people who want to share their story, and treating it with respect is leadership. Media funders should invest in models of listening leadership that are anchored in service, building trust over time and reflective of diverse experiences.
Sabrina Hersi Issa is an award-winning human rights technologist and leads global research and analysis for philanthropy. She organizes Rights x Tech, a gathering for technologists and activists and runs Survivor Fund, a political fund dedicated to supporting the rights of survivors of sexual violence.
A few months ago, I proposed that a lot of work in the democracy sector, and social change in general, can be captured in six distinct “impact models.” At Democracy Fund, these models have lent new nuance to a perpetual question: how do we measure the impact of democracy work? We understand that there’s a big difference between impact and no impact, and that we shouldn’t hide behind “impact is hard to measure” to avoid admitting when we’re simply not achieving it. But while I wish there was a methodological silver bullet to measure democratic change, the truth is that it can be hard to measure some impacts using specific evidence within a specific period of time. In other words, for some types of impact, the evidence is less, well, evident.
Looking back on evaluations that I’ve done, I can think of a number of instances where there was clear, objective evidence of impact from a transformative model: a new law passed, voter turnout increased. But I’ve struggled to find evidence of impact from preventative models: government overreach that was constrained, or civil rights abuses that were prevented.
I think the reason for this is actually pretty simple: what differentiates the impact models from each other also affects how likely they will be to result in “evident” impact – that is, impact that can be measured with specific evidence and in a specified time period. When we decide how to intervene in a system, we make two basic choices. The first is whether we’re looking for short-term or long-term change: does the intervention address specific, emergent threats or opportunities, or are those threats and opportunities more long-term and/or evolving? The second choice is whether the strategy is intended to disrupt the system or to make it more resilient: is the intervention responding to a deficiency or inefficiency in the system that needs to be changed, or is the intervention seeking to protect a system from threats or decline?
These choices also have implications for how “evident” the resulting impact will be. Disruptive interventions are more likely to yield evidence of impact because it’s easier to pinpoint how and why things change than how and why they remain stable. And because they address timebound threats or opportunities, short-term interventions are more likely to yield evidence of impact in a specific timeframe. So it follows that short-term disruptive models would be most likely to yield evident impact, while long-term resilient models would be the least likely, and short-term resilient and long-term disruptive models would fall somewhere in the middle.
In the framework below, I have attempted to map the impact models across these two dimensions (type of change and timeframe). Based on where they are located on the map, I’d offer the following conclusions:
Transformative and proactive models that leverage sudden openings to disrupt systems, are most likely to yield evident impact.
Incremental transformative, palliative and preventative models that focus on long-term resilience of systems are least likely to do so.
Stabilizing and preventative models that defend against threats by focusing on short-term resilience may yield some evident impact, but the full scope of that impact (including threats that were contained or thwarted) may be less evident.
Opportunistic models that invest in long-term disruption to achieve systems change, may produce some evident impact, but that’s dependent on the timeframe for a breakthrough.
I realize that doesn’t really answer the question of how to measure the impact of these models, particularly when the models are on the less evident end of the spectrum. But I think it prompts a different, and perhaps more important, question: if we accept the premise that some models of democracy work can have impact even if that impact isn’t evident, can we still make sound, evidence-based decisions about them?
Navigating complex systems is rife with uncertainty, and collecting relevant and meaningful evidence is part of how we mitigate the risk of that uncertainty. So pursuing an impact model that will leave us flying blind due to a lack of evidence might seem unacceptably risky. For example, if we know that we’re working toward palliative or preventative impact through long-term resilience, how do we mitigate the risk of a “boiling frog” scenario, in which the system’s lack of progress and/or slow decline eventually becomes untenable? And how do we know whether we’re confusing the “strategic patience” required for a long-term, disruptive intervention with a “sunk cost bias” that makes us hold on to a losing proposition? And even if we’re able to observe the impact of a short-term, disruptive intervention, how do we make sure we’re also capturing evidence of unanticipated, negative results?
But if we stick with the “safer” models – those that promise clear evidence of impact in a defined period of time – we may be left with a false sense of certainty about whether we’re pursuing the most effective and relevant solutions, or avoid tackling the thornier, longer-term challenges altogether. So lately I’ve been focused less on “how can we measure the impact of democracy work” and more on “what evidence do we need to be confident in our strategic choices?” Because now more than ever, democracy work requires courage and creativity, and I want to build an evidence-based evaluation and learning practice here at Democracy Fund that recognizes that. Of course there’s a big difference between impact and no impact, and of course we shouldn’t hide behind “impact is hard to measure” to avoid admitting when we’re simply not achieving it. But we also need to acknowledge that there’s a big difference between the easy wins and the risky plays, and we can’t hide behind “the impact will be hard to measure” to avoid tackling the big challenges. Our current political moment demands no less.
“Recognizing the challenges of leadership, along with the pains of change, shouldn’t diminish anyone’s eagerness to reap the rewards of creating value and meaning in other people’s lives.” — Ronald Heifetz, Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School
‘What is the future of news?’ is an evergreen question in journalism. Over the course of conducting this research, I continuously encountered the leadership and labor of individuals in journalism who did not wait for someone else to answer that question for them in order to execute necessary critical work to create the future of news we all deserve.
These solutions builders understand the nature of newsroom systems and practice adaptive leadership, a “… leadership framework that helps individuals and organizations adapt and thrive in challenging environments. It is being able, both individually and collectively, to take on the gradual but meaningful process of change. It is about diagnosing the essential from the expendable and bringing about a real challenge to the status quo.” Developing adaptive leadership is a model that is philanthropy supports in other sectors such as in education, healthcare and technology.
Often for media funders, support for initiatives intended to improve diversity in journalism are delivered to programs with explicit focus, such as skills training, leaving gaps of support for initiatives to address the implicit systems that undermine newsroom efforts to recruit, retain and promote diverse journalists; bias, discrimination, managers ill-equipped to support diverse direct reports, targeted harassment, pay inequity, burnout, and advocating for oneself, to name a few.
In newsrooms, adaptive leaders steward progress through complex systems. The adaptive leaders interviewed for this research who witnessed or experienced systemic failures went to work to fill this gap in order to improve the field, often did so without institutional support and in addition to current workload, creating a double burden and accelerating rates of burnout.
Invest in Systems Stewards & Possibility Builders
Tara Pixley was a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow and is one of the founding members of Reclaim, a project alliance of five organizations dedicated to “amplifying the voices of underrepresented photographers and decolonizing the photojournalism industry.”
“I believe deeply in journalism as a tool for democracy and as an imperative in our everyday lives and with that respect and that love and that passion for journalism in general, and photojournalism specifically, I want to make it better,” she said in a New York Times piece announcing the project. A PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego, Pixley is approaching designing solutions with the expertise of a trained social scientist: she is collecting the missing datasets and has an open survey for photojournalists, a design approach supported in an earlier piece of reported research for media funders seeking to support diverse journalism ecosystems. There is an opportunity for media funders to support adaptive leadership initiatives from diverse journalists building solutions and practicing a form of industry intrapreneurship that should be cultivated and invested in.
Rachel Wedinger shared with me in an interview for this research:
“It’s important to support individuals who have a very high level of comfort with complexity because we are going to act in values-based way within a complex system. I don’t really see the point of understanding a complex system if you continue from the other side of that understanding to act in the same kind of simplistic ways. Come to understand the landscape, come to understand the complex system that you’re trying to make change in and then make sure that your approach is taking into account that complexity in a real way.”
Project Alloy is another case for adaptive solutions-building from leaders within a different complex system struggling with diversity: the technology sector. Three leaders, Starr Simpson, Ian Smith and Brooke Jarrett, created the nonprofit to provide grants to underrepresented individuals in the industry to attend technical conferences otherwise financially inaccessible to them.
Simpson explains the impetus behind Project Alloy at GraceNotes, a convening created by another adaptive leader Tess Rinearson.
“When we give grants through Project Alloy, we give directly to people for whom we wish to open doors of opportunity. This approach is change we believe in, and also change within reach — we, as individuals who work in the tech industry, are capable of making this kind of difference for others. So we decided to form a nonprofit to centralize and scale the process so we could reach even more people.”
Image from Project Alloy
For media funders, there is opportunity to create agile grants that will support efforts from adaptive leaders like Pixby, Simpson and Rinearson. Their leadership is not only filling critical structural gaps within their respective sectors but also cultivates talent from underrepresented backgrounds to create a community of people who will ultimately support one another down the line and over the arc of their careers. Yet these efforts are unfunded, underfunded or side projects added to already demanding workloads.
Simpson explains the level of volunteer labor in her GraceNotes talk: “All three of us are volunteers. We have accomplished what we have so far by meeting every single week for over a year and a half for an hour in our free time,”
There is room to invest in those stewarding inclusion in their fields and there is a substantial need to invest in individual leaders who have entrepreneurial tendencies for solutions building.
Invest in Implicit Needs for Underrepresented Leaders
I reached out to Medina for an interview on this subject as I knew her reputation as the driving force behind major organizational shifts and internal innovation within an institution known for a deeply entrenched resistance to change: the CIA.
Medina’s analysis of change and development balances leadership needs that are both macro and micro in nature, she explains the importance for an individual to understand the system they operate in and invest in making those systems better but also recognizes the need for the organization to invest in the growth of individual employees.
As a change agent and leader of color, Medina recalls, “I wish I had had mentors. I wish that there had been people before me who had been Latina and female who could have said, ‘Watch for this. Don’t watch for that. Don’t do this, do that.’ So, I think the lack of a mentor was a real problem. I wish I had really understood better how people saw me or heard me.” But, as Medina goes on to explain, she was not completely lacking for mentors, “I did have mentors but they were white males, great people. I don’t think that they ever felt that they could have had a conversation with me to say, ‘Tone that down’ because for them, of course, it’s a hazardous conversation to have. I was completely sympathetic to where they were coming from.”
In this context, there was not an explicit need for mentorship but rather an implicit need for support from another woman of color within the ranks. For funders seeking to support diverse ecosystems, adaptive leaders from underrepresented backgrounds often have unique experiences, workplace vulnerabilities and needs that tie back to inequitable structures within organizations. To solve for that, we must name and address that the systems these leaders operate in, that are already inherently unbalanced and drive resources for corrective adjustments.
Emily May, Executive Director of Hollaback an organization dedicated to ending harassment, spoke to me about the experience designing solutions with journalists of color targeted for online harassment. “Women and people of color across the board were more severely impacted because it was worse and it came loaded with an entire lifetime of harassment and discrimination that this sat on top of it of these attacks.” May’s organization, nationally known for its bystander intervention programs, created a program to support newsrooms and media companies in addressing online harassment of journalists from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds experience at alarming rates. In this case there is an explicit urgency to address this implicit need, as harassment campaigns targeting journalists from vulnerable and underrepresented communities are actively creating unsafe work conditions and driving talent from the field. May shared that in surveying journalists in Hollaback’s trainings, “most people reported that they had no idea how bad online harassment was going to be and that it made them consider leaving journalism.”
It is difficult to surface to higher and higher levels of leadership when your mere presence, as a person from an underrepresented background, creates a hypervisibility. Medina speaks to her experience navigating those dynamics as a senior-level official within the CIA:
“Often times when you’re a minority in an organization, you come across as a rebel or a dissident even if that is never your intent. That was a big learning for me that, by definition, people would see me as disruptive of the status quo just by my heritage. I didn’t even have to speak up. Then when you do speak up, you will actually have a greater chance of seeing things differently from the prevailing norms. However distant you are from the prevailing norms, that’s how greater your likelihood is of being disruptive in what you say.”
For adaptive leaders from underrepresented backgrounds, visibility is a double-edged sword: there is both a power and a vulnerability to being seen. It is incumbent upon newsrooms and funders supporting news organizations to name these structural barriers and invest in systems that mitigate its negative impact so that diverse talent at all levels of newsrooms can thrive.
Sabrina Hersi Issa is an award-winning human rights technologist and leads global research and analysis for philanthropy. She organizes Rights x Tech, a gathering for technologists and activists and runs Survivor Fund, a political fund dedicated to supporting the rights of survivors of sexual violence.
“Media in Indian Country are grappling with many of the same challenges around sustainability that face the rest of the journalism industry, but it is exacerbated by low levels of philanthropic support.”
This double-edged challenge is what led us to commission leading researchers and practitioners from around the country to write a series of reports featuring American Indian, African American, and Hispanic media in the United States.
We wanted to shine a light on the important role of media by and for diverse communities in the United States and learn more about the unique issues these various sectors of media are facing. And as funders who are invested in diversity, equity, and inclusion in media—both internally in newsroom staff and leadership, but also in the communities these outlets serve—we wanted to listen to media makers of color and identify opportunities to sustain ethnic media into the future.
We believe that every community member must have access to accurate, diverse, and representative sources of news to inform their everyday lives and enable them to fully participate in our democracy. Our hope is that other funders and advocates will join us in recognizing and supporting the important role ethnic media plays in fulfilling these needs.
Here is the full series:
American Indian Media Today. Through a series of interviews with Native media practitioners and experts, Jodi Rave of the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance reports on the major trends and challenges for American Indian media today. The report also offers recommendations for funders and advocates who want to support the growth of independent news media in Indian Country.
African American Media Today. Angela Ford, Kevin McFall, and Bob Dabney of The Obsidian Collection provide a brief history of African-American and black legacy media, an overview of current trends and challenges, and offer recommendations for funders and advocates who want to support the growth and strength of Black publishers across the country.
Hispanic Media Today. Jessica Retis, Associate Professor of Journalism at California State University Northridge, provides a brief history of Hispanic media in the United States, an overview of current trends and challenges, and offers recommendations for funders and advocates who want to help support and sustain Hispanic media.
Democracy Fund has been working to build a robust infrastructure of support for these newsrooms through investments in organizations like the Center for Community and Ethnic Media, the Obsidian Collection, and our ongoing support of journalism associations serving journalists and media makers of color. In addition, our Ecosystem News strategy works with local communities around the US to support ethnic and community media locally, and our NewsMatch campaign helps build the long term capacity of newsrooms to build support from their communities. However, as these reports show, there is still a long way to go and much more work to do. In the coming months, we’ll be sharing more about how we are building on the lessons from these reports and deepening our support for media makers of color across the country.
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